TRON to carry gas-free Tether (USDT) transfers in the coming week

TRON will introduce a new tool to send Tether (USDT) on its network without the need for gas fees. While USDT has a high turnover on the TRON network, it still requires a balance of TRX to transact.

Tether (USDT) on TRON will be used without gas payments, no longer requiring users to keep a TRX balance for fees. USDT on TRON is among the most actively used stablecoins and among the big gas burners on the chain. 

Justin Sun, TRON’s founder, announced the gas feature would launch in the coming week. The technology to send USDT with no additional TRX payments has been in the works since 2024 and is expected by December, but it was finalized just as the market was experiencing a liquidity crunch. 

Tron's Gas Free feature supporting USDT gas payments without the need for TRX will launch within the next week. Teams and wallets wishing to support this feature, please contact support@justlend.org. Keep Building!

— H.E. Justin Sun 🍌 (@justinsuntron) February 25, 2025

The feature integration will depend on individual wallets and apps wishing to support this version of USDT. The decision from TRON arrives after users complained about unpredictable stablecoin fees. At the end of 2024, BNB Chain also subsidized its gas fees for a small selection of wallets, leading to free transactions. 

TRON-based USDT also allows for native multi-sig storage, as Sun pointed out in a recent post. 

TRON requires complex calculations for stablecoin transfers

TRON users wishing to cut their fees in half can signal to a bot that will provide a small amount of TRX. Fees for sending USDT are lower when moving funds to a non-empty wallet with a minimal amount of TRX. 

The USDT token is the leading smart contract on TRON, driving the chain’s engagement. Based on TRON data, more than 98% of all calls to contracts on the chain are linked to USDT. 

Despite the generally low fees for using the TRON chain, in some cases, using USDT has cost up to $9 per transaction. Despite the high capacity, energy on TRON is limited and may lead to temporary congestion conditions. 

One of the reasons for the USDT congestion is that TRON wallets have limited energy for daily transactions. Stablecoin transactions on TRON depend on the available energy for each wallet, and despite the network’s low fees, often USDT transactions can become overly expensive. 

TRON fees for stablecoins get ahead of other networks

The TRON chain is currently expensive to transact in stablecoins. Despite the trend for small-scale payments, a USDT transaction may cost from $3.22 to $6.54. For Ethereum, due to favorable gas conditions, the fee is just $0.31, an unusually low value. 

TRON’s most common USDT transaction is for sums between $100 and $1,000. In the past few weeks, TRON is more rarely used for small-scale transfers under $10, again due to the unpredictable nature of fees. As of February 2025, the level of whale-sized transactions is higher for Ethereum-based USDT, with almost negligible movements on TRON. 

The supply of TRON-based USDT also expanded in the past weeks, up to 62.74B tokens. More wallets also added USDT, expanding the holders to 61.62M. Despite this, over 51.9M wallets hold under $100 in USDT value.

The new TRC-20 minting expanded the total supply of Tether’s main stablecoin. In the past month, USDT added 4.9B new tokens to its supply. Stablecoins are becoming more important for both centralized trading and DEX activity as TRON aims to build its DeFi sector with more accessible liquidity. 

As of February, the supply of stablecoins increased to $227.1B, with Ethereum remaining the leading chain. TRON-based USDT was more often used for peer-to-peer markets and is one of the assets closely watched for scam usage. 

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